507: sigh

You know how they used to use an 'f' in place of an 's' for some reason in old printed books, e.g. 'fcience' etc. Well, they did. I'm watching Botany: A Blooming History on BBC4, through an unpleasant fug of cold with just the slightest hint of flu symptoms, and have just been delighted by an archaic spelling of 'honeysuckle'... can you guess how they spelt it? That's right, 'honeyfuckle', ha ha, honeyfuckle, oh my days! Oh, dear; forgive me Miller and Linnaeus (fight, fight, fight).

Linnaeus gave us the binomial system for classifying life, for which we should all be eternally grateful. Someone else gave me the common cold, or some measly weaselly flu-like thing, for which I will be annoyed and pathetic for the next couple of days. I've already been accused of having man-flu, by 'my' woman, through the medium of tweeting (on twitter), and I've had enough. How much snot must a man produce, before you will call it just flu, and not man-flu? Can't remember what any of this had to do with Linnaeus.

I know it's a real nasty piece of cold because I need to keep a carrier bag near by to collect all the used tissues, and I have spent more time in bed than I have since my student days. And after writing one sentence I can't think what to say next. So, erm. Forget it. Sorry to waste your time. Here are some pictures:

313: BLACKPOOL - Wish you were here?

Blackpool today, and I got through ten handy-packs of Kleenex and had to resort to stealing loo roll.  (Compulsory retort to obvious masturbatory-themed joke, “Yes, it was that exciting”.)  Crippled by a summer cold/severe hayfever, but the jolly uplifting fun of Blackpool still allows me to say C’est la vie and live and let live to the cold virus and the plant pollen.  Aside: no it doesn’t; despite the fun of Blackpool I still cry death to common colds and all anemophilous plant species.  But, erm?  Oh, yes... Blackpool!

Things I saw in Blackpool

• As we were arriving the car in front had a Blackpool FC scarf which boasted We Are Premier!  No you’re not mate.  Get with the now granddad.

• Moments after parking the car we saw our first hen do.  The oldies walked with their sashes reading mother of the bride, mother of the groom, and the like.  The youngies trailed behind with their bride to be and bridesmaid sashes.  All wore blue denim skirts, black tops, and pink deely-boppers.  We turned the corner and outside the first B&B we passed, sat a stag-do drinking blue WKD with their breakfast.  Welcome to Blackpool!

• Of course everywhere we looked there were stag and hen parties, all dressed to match one another, and all having a huge time in the North West’s capital of the pre-nuptial celebration.  One group of young women were dressed from head to toe in black robes; sort of like a shapeless colourless sheet, that even covered their heads and faces leaving only a small slit for the eyes.  They weren’t wearing sashes so I couldn’t tell which one was getting married.

• You now have to pass through security scanners and undergo a bag search to get into Blackpool Pleasure Beach; bit weird.  They confiscated my spanner which I had cruelly calculated to throw into the works.  As it turns out I didn’t need to, as the heat was doing its best to shut down all the rides.

• In the queue for the Big One a large dark-haired woman in a black flowered summer dress had an entire ‘knitted’ sleeve of self-harmed scar tissue, unbroken from shoulder to wrist.  And she wasn’t even close to being the weirdest looking person there.  No offence Blackpool, but your gene pool is dangerously shallow.  There are a lot of sand-scraping knuckles, Neanderthal brow-ridges and overly hairy faces... and that’s just the women... the orange women...

• A spectacularly good collection of seaside postcards.

• Hot dogs, fish and chips, ice cream, chips and gravy, candy floss, seagull, cockles, muscles, whelks and oiks.  Snotty tissues.

152: Absolute zero

Shivering on the electric blanket; every time a piece of flesh peaks out from beneath the covers, the frosty teeth in the air bite away chunks.  My fingers are worn down to raw nubs, like half eaten Mini Milks.  The drain for the kitchen sink seems to have frozen and is causing a leak from the washing machine outlet.  Droplets of liquid nitrogen hang in the air, feeling like burning coals as the freeze my skin.  The radiators can barely muster the effort to gasp out one degree centigrade, and my toes snap and drop off one by one.

I awoke from a dream world of a snowball Earth where frozen seas create a new icy supercontinent.  Snowmen had colonised all the frozen land and sea with vast sprawling megacities, and all vestiges of humanity lay forgotten under ten kilometres of ice and snow.  Sentient snowmanity dominates and past present and future shows no sign of things ever being different.  Measurements such as centigrade and Fahrenheit are long forgotten and would be impractical, focused as they are around unbearably hot temperatures; 0°c is equal to the fatally hot 273 Kelvin, the point where snowmanity and all snowman civilisation turns into lifeless liquid water.

my street as viewed from the window

The concept of Absolute Zero is worshipped as a god-like ideal in the same way the Borg revere the Omega particle.  Pure bars of the noble metal Rhodium sit on altars, contained within a field and cooled to less than 1 K.  Snowman scientists reach out to the Boomerang Nebula as the coldest naturally occurring place in the currently observable universe, and faithful snowmen bow their heads to the ground and weep joyful tears as they contemplate eternal life in the Nebula.  Religious texts speak of a singularity of Absolute Zero located in its centre.  Absolute Zero is said to grant wishes, cause natural disasters, occupy our thoughts and judge us after death.

I thought it a fleeting dream until I felt the encroaching cold and looked out of the window to see my ‘dream’ was a terribly accurate premonition.  Car bumpers are bearded with icicles and the pavement edges deeper down as the ice piles higher.  My insignificant and broken street has never seen a highway gritter, and soon it will be too late.

Blah blah cold, blah blah made up stuff about blah blah cold.  It’s about time I got up, put some hot water down the sink, sorted out the blockage, do the fucking dishes, tidy the flat, do some packing for tomorrow (fingers crossed for the flight), visited my friends and newly crawling godson, had a Christmas themed drink and all the other stuff.  Right; blog done for the day.  One chore down, a million more to complete.

104: bags, flys, stuff and alveoli

Right, let’s get this over and done with.  There is a rucksack across the room, that has been to Japan and back and waited for hours at Kuala Lumpur airport with me, and now it sits unused on the top shelf of the wardrobe.  In this light and from this angle it looks like a gigantic bluebottle.  The bottom bulges like the boggly compound eyes, and the straps hand in just the places to be mistaken for legs and feelers or antennae or whatever they are called.  It even appears to have wings.  Fortunately they are not too scale so it doesn’t appear too intimidating.  They are more like primitive stumps; evolving knobbles taking early steps up the gradual slopes of Mount Improbable, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins.

Nothing else in the room exactly resembles real things on an entirely unlikely scale.  Except my fingers which are the spitting likeness of microscopic cnidocyte cells of the box jellyfish.  And the bedroom door which viewed from this approach bears a distinct similarity to a satellite photograph of the Amazon delta.  The foot of the bed is a ten inch scale model of the Bradshaw Mountains in Arizona.  The piles of moisturiser and ‘product’ my girlfriend has amassed are a partially dissected frog beginning to recover from its anaesthetic.  The bedside table is a torn out page from the Argos catalogue featuring tents and tenting equipment, screwed up and left on a Subbuteo box.  The curtains are sheets of sandpaper and the window is like a box of chocolates...

Besides these recognisable likenesses there is little of interest.  I could lie on the lawn and stare at the clouds searching for unusual shapes; and I would if it wasn’t covered in cat shit, freezing cold and pitch black.  As it goes I will just have to make do with my giant Calliphora vomitoria.  It waits for me to sleep, disguised as a mostly harmless rucksack.  When I finally drift off she will feed on my decaying meat, leaving her monstrous maggots to gorge their fat wiggly bodies on my decomposing matter.

And this is what I get for watching David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth through the confused fug of a bad cold and a couple of mugs of hot toddy.  A toddy is recommended for anybody experiencing the creeping frost of autumn, but the common cold is so... common.  Blah.  I began this post by saying right, let’s get this over with and the time is upon us.  I ran out of steam at least a paragraph ago, and am now waiting for the word count to catch up.  Unfortunately I have to stop typing every few moments to cough another alveoli into my mouth.  And on that note; bye.

Block Chop 90: Freezing and mummification

It’s too cold.  I give up.  Like a microwave supposedly cooks from the inside out (but doesn’t really) this cold is turning my bone marrow to jagged ice crystals, edging slowly outwards freezing my gore and vitals.  It creeps upwards and outwards, shattering as it goes, like objects dipped in liquid nitrogen, forcing its way out through the back of my eyeballs and the depths of my nostrils.  I give up.  Moan over.  Now on to other more pressing matters (hopefully by the time I reach the end of this sentence I might know what these matters are).  (Nope, no such luck.)

Someone needs to do something about this fucking cold.  Not me but someone.  Superman, or one of those lot.  If Superman can turn back time by the method of spinning the earth in reverse orbit (which is about a much likely to work as stirring your tea in the opposite direction will turn it back to hot water and a dry virgin bag) then surely he can nudge the northern hemisphere in the direction of the sun.  Bugger the southern hemisphere.  It’s mostly water down there anyway.  So what if you’ve got Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar?  We’ve got Russia, Greenland and Canada!  Marsupials, platypuses and penguins?  Fuck ‘em; we’ve got pigeons, foxes and tiny harmless spiders we think are massive.  That dratted warmth-stealing Southern hemisphere is nearly all water anyway.  What a waste of a summer; putting it in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  Move it up here where it’s needed.  Specifically by me.

It doesn’t seem to be working.  Time has wobbled slightly, the stars are out of phase, a micro-black hole has lodged itself in the earth’s core and the sun has become a pulsar, but all in all it still remains pretty darn cold.  Not so cold that I don’t seem like a pathetic wimp for complaining about it, but just cold enough that I do complain.  It’s not life threatening, but I’ve clearly lost my cool.  It is at times like this when an electric blanket is literally the most wonderful thing in existence.  If it didn’t already exist I would fall down at the feet of its creator, kowtow, head to the ground, a low down bow, and form a new religion offering daily thanks for the magnificent Electric Blanket (PBUH).  Then I could demand time off work to offer these prayers at regular intervals of unrealistically high frequency, and scream discrimination when my wants are not met.

I wish I had died thousands of years ago, been mummified, entombed, discovered by 19^th Century French Egyptologists, shipped back to Europe, kept in a crate, manhandled, then eventually displayed in a delicately climate controlled environment.  The temperature would be kept at a safe and comfortable 21-24°C, and the humidity at 35-40%.  And as a dead, shrivelled corpse with cracked leathery skin, bones tearing through, and bared pointy teeth, I would not be responsible for the heating and electricity bills.  Score!  Another problem solved.